In WCF+MSMQ messages that are sent are first routed through an outgoing queue to provide guaranteed delivery when the target queue is offline. I’m unable to find any information that would indicate that this same strategy is available with any of the WCF bindings for Azure Service Bus. While the transient fault handling framework is good for handling short lived connectivity issues to Azure, there are far too many variables between my network and Azure Service Bus to guarantee delivery over longer term outages.
Is there an equivalent outgoing queue concept with WCF+Azure Service Bus? If no, what are the alternatives?
Not yet. All enqueue operations on Service Bus are remote. We have a sample (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazure/Brokered-Messaging-MSMQ-a31c6644) that shows how to bridge from MSMQ to Service Bus and it’s not unlikely that we’ll wrap that into the product and make that the longer term story. The logic here is that MSMQ is in every copy of Windows and thus it makes sense to use MSMQ as a bridgehead. Until then you have this as a sample to use a private MSMQ queue as a local footprint and then forward from there to SB